When choosing a specific geographic site for locating a wind farm it is important that the meteorological conditions at that site will suit the location of wind turbines there must be a wind resource of suitable quality to ensure that the located farm will provide a reasonable output. It is not sufficient that the site is exposed to wind, it is also useful that that wind is reasonably predictable. Unfortunately the information on the historical wind resource is not always available and there is therefore a need to use limited monitoring of the resource as an indicator of the potential future behavior.
One solution to this is to compare the short term measured meteorological data from the site with that of a regional meteorological station for which longer term data is available. As part of this approach the longer term data that is available from the meteorological station is used to effect a prediction of the output that may be expected from the wind farm site.
The difficulties associated with combining data sets from different locations within a region is that there is a possibility that the predicted output from the wind farm may be biased either to a low or a high value.
There is therefore a need to provide a methodology for predicting the future wind resource for a particular site that represents an accurate reflection of the expected conditions at that site.